Monthly Archives: February 2013

Reading documentation, blogs, and forums are useful ways to learn how to use jQuery, but there is ultimately no substitute for actually writing code. That’s why we’ve been collaborating with Code School to create Try jQuery, a brand new introductory course with video and interactive examples to make it easier to take those first steps.

Try jQuery walks you through the most fundamental building blocks of jQuery, from actually getting the library into your page to selecting, manipulating, and creating DOM elements, and reacting to user input. The entire experience takes place in the browser, so there’s live feedback on your code as you complete the exercises and learn the basics.

The course takes about three hours to complete, but you can take it all at your own pace. Best of all, Try jQuery is completely free! If you’d like to save your progress and earn badges, you can sign up with Code School.

We’re really glad to be able to provide new jQuery users with an easy way to get started. So if you’re looking to understand how to use jQuery — or know someone else who is — we hope Try jQuery helps get you in gear!

To magnify your jQuery migration pleasure, version 1.1.1 of the jQuery Migrate plugin is now available. This plugin can greatly simplify the process of moving older jQuery code to version 1.9.0 or higher of jQuery by identifying deprecated features. It can also restore those features so that older code can run without needing any changes at all. We strongly recommend that you use this plugin in your initial jQuery 1.9 upgrade — make it easy on yourself, that’s why we wrote this plugin!

Using the plugin is easy; just include it immediately after the script tag for jQuery, for example.
<script src="http://code.jquery.com/jquery-1.9.1.js"></script>
<script src="http://code.jquery.com/jquery-migrate-1.1.1.js"></script>

Here are the items we’ve polished for this version; you can see the complete list at Github. Many thanks to jQuery team member Richard Gibson for his help on this release.

Remove “use strict”: Not all code is compatible with JavaScript’s “use strict” mode, so we’ve removed this restriction for the same reason we did in jQuery 1.9.1. This fixes some issues with diagnostic software that uses arguments.caller and with form processing in ASP.NET.

$.parseJSON in $.ajax: In 1.9 when an $.ajax() call specifies a dataType: "json" the returned value MUST be valid JSON. Older versions treated an empty string as a success even though it was not valid JSON. The Migrate plugin will now warn about this, treat the result as success and return null as older versions did.

Preserve custom $.browser: If the $.browser object has been changed or augmented by code that loaded before jQuery Migrate, those changes will now be preserved. However, we still advise the Migrate plugin be loaded immediately after the jQuery core file.

Today I’m proud to announce the official opening of the jQuery Learning Center, a community-driven site dedicated to helping people learn about jQuery, JavaScript and front-end development. The goal is to provide a resource that can fill in the gaps that necessarily exist between reading about APIs and actually understanding how to use jQuery effectively. We know a lot of people scour the web each day for this type of information, and we hope the Learning Center can serve as a dependable place for our users to turn.

The Learning Center will continue to evolve, but it would not be what it is today without Rebecca Murphey’s jQuery Fundamentals, which she donated to the jQuery Foundation to form its original nucleus. (Thanks Rebecca!) For this initial launch, we’ve worked to supplement this with information about jQuery UI and jQuery Mobile, features that have been added to jQuery in the interim, and other blog posts and articles from other authors. We’ve also ported over most of what remained on docs.jquery.com, as the Learning Center is indeed intended to be its replacement: documentation that anyone can use — and edit!

There are lots of folks in the jQuery community who like to share their knowledge with others and spend a lot of time writing articles and giving advice, hoping only that it helps someone else understand how to make a decision or get out of a jam. The jQuery Learning Center is for you too. We hope that it will empower those of you who already do this (and those who haven’t — yet) to reach the right audience: the people looking for it! The Learning Center is the latest in the jQuery Foundation’s series of open content sites, so all of the articles are written in Markdown and the entire site is open source. Whether you’ve got a new article you’d like to get published or just notice a typo, the Learning Center is certainly one area of jQuery that’s open to all sorts of new feature requests!

You can find out more about the jQuery Learning Center, and if you’re interested in helping out, you should definitely take a look at our Contributing Guide. We’ll continually seek to flesh out the subject matter on the site, so whether you’ve already got a great idea, an old StackOverflow answer that you always thought “should be in the docs,” or want to take a look at the existing issues for inspiration, there’s sure to be something you can dig into!

The jQuery team is pleased to announced that jQuery 1.9.1 is available! This release addresses the bugs and regressions that have been reported during the past few weeks. Whether you’re using 1.9.0 or using an older version, these are the droids you’re looking for.

Please, please, please, use the jQuery Migrate plugin and look at the upgrade guide if you’re just starting your upgrade to jQuery 1.9. The plugin will quickly find and fix any compatibility issues, just look in the browser console. Once you fix the warnings you can remove it. Or, leave the plugin in place until you have the chance to fix your code and plugins to make them 1.9-compatible.

We’ve sent the files to the Google and Microsoft folks, so you should see them up on their CDNs shortly.

Many thanks to those of you who reported bugs, and to the following people who contributed patches to the 1.9.1 release: Adam Coulombe, Andrew Plummer, Corey Frang, Danil Somsikov, Jean Boussier, Julian Aubourg, Mike Sherov, Oleg Gaidarenko, Richard Gibson, Ryunosuke Sato, and Timmy Willison.

Gold-leaf-cluster thanks to Paul Irish, who mobilized special forces to find a solution for 13274!